Antecedents of malevolent creativity: a meta-analysis of personality and press predictors.

Creativity is often regarded as a positive force driving scientific invention, artistic production, and social progress. Yet creativity can also serve harmful ends. This darker side of creativity, commonly referred to as malevolent creativity (MC), refers to the intentional generation of novel ideas or behaviors aimed at harming others, often to gain an unfair advantage through manipulation, threat, or direct harm (). Its defining features are intentional harmfulness and originality, and manifestations range from interpersonal aggression and social manipulation to large-scale acts such as terrorism (). Because such acts rely on novelty, they often evade existing rules and are difficult to anticipate or detect, amplifying their harmful consequences (; ). Although meta-analytic work on MC has begun to emerge, existing syntheses have focused primarily on outcomes and correlates of MC rather than systematically examining its antecedents. As a result, the relative contributions of person-level factors such as personality traits and press-level factors such as environmental stressors remain unclear, and the boundary conditions under which these effects are stronger or weaker have not been quantitatively examined. The present meta-analysis addresses this gap by providing the first comprehensive quantitative synthesis of the antecedents of MC within the 4P framework (), focusing on person and press factors across 55 studies and 362 effect sizes. Most theoretical accounts of malevolent creativity have been drawn from the aggression and creativity literature. In the present work, we use the classic 4P framework as an organizing lens to reinterpret this field (). The 4P framework conceptualizes creativity in terms of person, press, process, and product. This framework is particularly suitable for understanding malevolent creativity because the existing literature has consistently identified both dispositional and situational antecedents as its primary drivers, mapping directly onto the person and press components of the model. At the dispositional level, traits such as physical aggression, conscientiousness, and emotional intelligence have been linked to malevolent creativity, while at the situational level, environmental contexts such as perceived unfairness have been shown to elicit malevolent creative behavior (; ; ; for a review, see ). Moreover, consistent with prior meta-analytic work in creativity research, most empirical studies focus on one or two perspectives of the 4P model rather than all four simultaneously (), suggesting that a focused examination of person and press factors is both theoretically defensible and methodologically appropriate. Here, we focus on person and press, as these two components capture the antecedent conditions most commonly examined in research on malevolent creativity. Person refers to individual characteristics, such as knowledge, experience, personality traits, attitudes, motivation, and persistence (). Press refers to environmental forces that shape thinking and behavior, including ideological climates, social contexts, and external rewards or punishments (). While the remaining two components of the 4P model, product and process, are acknowledged as important aspects of malevolent creativity, they fall outside the scope of the present meta-analysis; their potential interactions with person and press factors represent a valuable direction for future research.